Fear and loathing and 𝘍𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨.

Kent’s Recommended Read:

Søren Kierkegaard:
Fear and Trembling

Again, I’m not actually reading the version at right. I downloaded it free off the internet.

Kierkegaard’s a weird read. He reminds me of pastors who have a really simple message… at the end of their sermons. Meanwhile, you’ve got to tolerate fifteen minutes of pseudo-spiritual babbling about what it all means, and how frustrating it is to seek out the meaning behind it all.

I feel like throttling the dude and telling him, “I got a life to live; get to the point, you over-analytical, insecure, Danish pansy. So faith isn’t as simple as you once thought. Welcome to Christian maturity! Now that you’ve recognized there’s more to Christianity than fundamentalism, stop whining about how difficult it’s all become. Jesus never promised it would be a picnic.”

He does exhaust my patience, you see. But that’s because he, like so many philosophers I’ve read, doesn’t go anywhere. Many of them have two or three really good ideas; the rest of their treatises are padding to make the thing slightly bigger than a pamphlet. Some are better at padding than others; Kierkegaard’s got a lot of really good sayings, but it’s all jumbled together (and, to be fair, suffers from the usual awful translation by some academic shmuck who wants to translate word-for-word instead of into contemporary English).

I gotta pick better light reading.

Is this history repeating itself again?

Imagine if someone remade this movie with a gay couple.

In honor of Martin Luther King, our student senate decided to show Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? during dinner. I’ve seen it before, so I didn’t have to worry about being distracted by everything else that was going on in the café.

One of the professors briefly interrupted the movie to give some background about the movie. She spent a good deal of time talking about interracial marriage, the attitude of many people in the ’60s against it, the statements then made about how it was “unnatural” and “unbiblical”, how the courts eventually declared the laws against interracial marriage to be unconstitutional (and how great that was), and how it was a great step forward for civil rights.

“Now, for fun,” I told the people at my table, “take every time she said ‘interracial’ and replace it with ‘gay.’ ”

They reacted with some horror, which was fun to watch. But considering her speech, the protests against interracial marriage were so parallel to the current protests against gay marriage that I couldn’t help wondering how we’ll see the present-day issue of gay marriage in 40 years.

More griping about unwelcoming churches.

If this sounds like a rerun from last semester, it’s because I had a similar experience today. I went to Christian Life Center in Santa Cruz, where nobody said anything to me other than people I knew already, or people who had to because we were at that part in the service where people turn around and briefly greet one another. Oh, there was someone who offered me a bulletin, but that’s it.

I was sitting in Pizza My Heart after the service, thinking about this and realizing that, as a Christian, I am Jesus’s ambassador. Admittedly, I suck at it, but that has nothing to do with the reality of it. Now, consider what trouble Washington can get into with other countries if they refuse to acknowledge those countries’ ambassadors, no matter how much the ambassadors may suck at the job.

I’m not saying Jesus is going to smite them or anything; I just figure he’s displeased. You may recall how, in his parable about sheep and goats, he identifies with the least of his brothers (and I’m certainly not the greatest of them) to the degree that if you slight them, you slight him.

Then there’s how the non-Christians might react to similar treatment. You’ve likely seen the results—remember when you tried to tell them about Jesus and they told you that Christians are just "a bunch of stuck-up self-righteous a--holes?" How’d they come to the conclusion that we were stuck-up? Street corner bullhorn preachers may be self-righteous, and apologetics-pushers are all too frequently a--holes, but where does "stuck-up" come from? Obviously they went to church at some point and were ignored. So they’re gonna ignore Jesus right back.

I’m tempted to turn my experiences into an article about it for Santa Cruz Metro or one of the other local alternative papers and embarass the hell out of the local churches. Maybe it’ll wake them up, at least; they’re really blowing it. Or maybe I should go back to Catholicism or something. I dunno.

Flunking students is never fun.

I may be giving away too much information by ranting about this, but I gotta vent.

I advise the yearbook. That means I’m responsible for answering any questions the yearbook editor has, helping out where needed, and grading the students who have signed up for the yearbook course.

I stated in the syllabus what the requirements were in order to get a grade; I expected to give out a lot of easy A’s because the requirements weren’t that hard. Simply put, they were to send me a copy of whatever was contributed to the yearbook. You lay out a page, you print an extra copy and send it to me. You take photos, you send extra copies to me. You write something, you send an extra copy to me. Or you email any of these things. Whatever.

Simple, right? Easy A, right? So you’d think. Some students sent me nothing. So what other choice to I have? I can’t grade them based on happy thoughts. I warned them, I waited, then I turned in the grades. Those students did not receive anything close to an easy A.

I hate giving Fs. Mainly because every time I’ve given a student an F, I have to take an unbelievable amount of crap from people who refuse to accept the responsibility for their grades. Either I’m being mean, vindictive, or incompetent; anything to deflect the blame.

So I have students and an editor annoyed at me, and I can’t do a bloody thing about it until people start sending me stuff.

But other than that… My dad sent me an email about the history of the Scotch-Irish, which he claims we are.

What are the Scotch-Irish? Apparently, Scottish people migrated to Northern Ireland in the distant past (probably back when the English were conquering Ireland again) and eventually migrated to America. In order to distinguish themselves from regular Irish people, whom they considered to be white trash, they called themselves Scotch-Irish.

Great. More bigots in my family. I got more than enough of those.

Tsunami relief: Keep donating to the American Red Cross. People don’t magically get all better just because you sent them twenty bucks last week.

Where was God when the tsunami hit?

I find it fascinating to watch Christians struggle with the issue of God and the tsunami. I don’t struggle with it. Tsunamis happen; people die; that’s life; life sucks. But God is good. At the End, God will bring every last tsunami victim back to life, and they will live forever.

Some Christians don’t find comfort in this because they suspect that most of the tsunami victims were pagans and will rise again only to be thrown into the burning lake. But again, God is good. More of those people are his than we Christians suspect, because he is much less judgmental and more forgiving than we are.

Speaking of which… I had two people gripe about donating to the Red Cross. “Why,” they wondered (though not necessarily in these words) “are you encouraging people to donate there, when they can donate to Christian charities which will share the gospel with the victims?”

Simple. The Red Cross has the resources to accept big donations and quickly act to help the needy. The Christian charities, sadly, just aren’t as efficient. If you want to save the most people, you have to go with the more effective organization.

Plus, if the Red Cross is successful at saving the most people, it keeps more people alive for us Christians to evangelize. Hopefully by then we’ll be able to answer their questions about where God was in the tsunami. (Quick answer: He wasn’t. See 1 Kings 19.11-12.)

Maybe this doesn’t help our image any.

Watched 24 on Sunday and Monday, which brings up this debate. In the show, Keifer Sutherland’s character shoots a terrorist in the leg in order to get him to tell what he’s plotting. This is typical behavior for the hero of this show; and yet we’re trying to convince the rest of the world that the naked human dogpiles that took place in the Abu Graib prison is not typical American treatment of prisoners.

Of course, now that I’m back at school, I don’t have time for TV anymore.

Tsunami relief: Donate to the American Red Cross. And don’t forget to give blood.

I enjoy holidays too much to rant.

Perhaps the reason I rant less when I’m at home is because I’m happier. Or perhaps it’s because I can let off steam at my family. I don’t know; it definitely isn’t because I’ve been busy.

Hello to everyone who wondered what happened to me, all two of you. Happy new year. The cat’s still dead.

I didn’t get everything I requested for Christmas, but I got everything I needed.

I was reading some old Calvin and Hobbes strips and was struck by the paradox: Calvin is greedy for presents, so he has to be good so that Santa will bring him presents; yet Calvin’s motivation for being good is greed, which (contrary to films like Wall Street) isn’t good. I’m surprised the cartoonist, who is usually good at catching little philosophical problems like that, didn’t catch this one. Oh well; leave it to me to over-analyze comic strips.

I have to go back to school this week. Back to school; back to work. I’m not necessarily looking forward to it. The schoolwork isn’t any fun. But hey—you do what you have to do if you want the career. Besides, it’s never the classes you remember from college; it’s the people.